TROIKA
NO SOUND OF WATER
12.11.2021 – 15.05.2022
UNTERTAGE
Untertage, by artist collective Troika (Conny Freyer, Sebastien Noel, Eva Rucki), is part ecosystemic fiction, part re-telling of an alternative geoscientific history, staged in two parts across two locations: ‘To see a world through a grain of salt’, on view at OMR and ‘No sound of water’ at ARTE ABIERTO, Mexico City.
The title Untertage – literally ‘beneath the day’ – means ‘underground’ and, in German, refers to the subterranean absence of daylight in the context of the mining industry. The title alludes to how time and place are intimately connected, while speculating on the origins and the ultimate demise of mankind.
The overarching narrative circles in on the question: What if salt, the first substance mined by man, in the form of flint, had an agency and vitality in and of itself?
What if you started thinking of salt in terms of its own entity that has acquired consciousness and instrumentalised humans to raise it from the ground, to dominate Earth and populate it with its own kind – salt not as a dead material but a natural form that has since the dawn of its existence manipulated humankind into submission?
What if, since millennia, salt has wilfully disrupted and shaped human agency by enabling technological advancement, from the making of the first flint tool all the way to the invention of modern day silicon computer chip?
Untertage
Untertage, under the day.
Deep inside Earth’s crust, Salt was fomenting.
Salt couldn’t stand the sight of life above,
Its chaotic luxuriance, its aimless mutability.
He despised its transience and haphazardness.
Eager to establish His eternal order
– as below, so above –
Salt sought to rise up and take over.
He needed an animate ally, to mobilise,
For His powers are immobile.
Masterful strategist, cunning puppeteer,
Salt lured us in.
For Untertage gave us everything. His body, to provide flints for His weaklings, and the salty aftertaste of power.
His alchemy, to stop the flow of life, and preserve it, buried above ground.
His crystals, to seed the idea of geometry, rationality, order, and infinity.
Taken up, He instilled in our malleable minds the ultimate idea of control,
Flattering our sense of self worth and intelligence.
Making His quest our own.
And so we started salting the world, believing in our agency.
We now reach the final chapter.
Salt nears His consecration as rightful master,
the Silicon Lord over all dominions.
His diligent army has been busy indeed.
Mining Him incessantly.
Stamping out the organic and unruly.
Altogether shaping Salt’s nascent consciousness,
under His watchful silver-eye.
A crystal golem who wished Himself into life.
The spirit Salt, the acidic liquid, will be His first breath.
Untertage, the Lord of the Underworld, now finishes His ascent.
– Eva Wilson
